Interplays between Policy and Practice on Rangelands in Kazakhstan since the 1990s

Kazakhstan contains a large share of the world’s remaining “near-natural” temperate grassland, so how the Kazakh rangelands are managed has global implications for plant and animal biodiversity, carbon stocks, and at a national level for the wellbeing of Kazakhstan’s land, people and the economy. The extensive livestock and rangeland management systems of Kazakhstan were transformed after the early 1990s. Privatisation had deep and very damaging structural impacts. There are now considerable inequities in the distribution of state support, landed resources and livestock, with the appearance of a minority of large-scale livestock owners. Government policies allowed these livestock owners to register title over former state pastureland containing key natural and infrastructural resources. As the national economy was bolstered by oil and gas extraction, increased demand for meat encouraged accumulation of livestock and capital investment into larger livestock enterprises, widening the disparity with the majority of small-scale livestock owners, who also own the majority of the livestock. The Kazakh government now has programmes that support large-scale livestock owners, through subsidies backed by loans from international financial agencies. The mass of small-scale owners is ignored, as the government considers these mostly sedentary livestock farmers to be economically unviable and their animals a threat to the grazing land around villages. This is because small-scale livestock owners are unable to achieve economies of scale permitting seasonal migration to distant pastures, in contrast to the bigger-scale livestock owners who have re-adopted the former migratory management system. Smaller-scale livestock producers are major suppliers of livestock products to the market and also uphold rural livelihoods with employment and food. Government efforts to promote productivity and growth for the livestock sector could promote seasonal mobile livestock management for small as well as large-scale livestock owners, which can be more environmentally sustainable and economically efficient than greater reliance on cultivated fodder crops and reduced grazing

Some research and development implications for pastoral dairy production in Africa

Examines the relative merits of milk versus meat production by African pastoralists. Discusses the implications for livestock development policy

The role of milk in a pastoral diet and economy: The case of South Darfur, Sudan

Describes the characteristics of dairy production and processing in South Darfur and provides an analysis of the way in which pastoral families vary their diets according to seasonal food shortages and shifting terms of trade between milk and food grains

Benefits and costs of diverting 0.2 MGD influent from Los Alamos County wastewater system to Los Alamos National Laboratory Sanitary Wastewater System.

The Sanitary Waste System (SWS) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is an extended-air, activated sludge wastewater treatment facility that is designed to treat 0.6 million gallons per day (MGD). However, the facility rarely receives more than 0.3 MGD and occasionally less than 0.1 MGD. Lack of sufficient flow and organic concentration into SWS, particularly on weekends and holidays, results in an inconsistent and often very low biochemical oxygen demand (BOD). Shortage of organic material leads to routine operation weaknesses and leaves SWS vulnerable to significant problems resulting from small amounts of toxic influents. The addition of residential influent from Los Alamos County will supply organic load to decrease this vulnerability, and improve nitrification during cold weather, weekends and holidays. Additional benefits include conservation of 223 acre-feet per year and significant savings when project dollars are not discounted. The project will also generate significant benefits not easily quantified, such as water for future LANL projects, and good will in the community

Livelihoods and basic service support in the drylands of the Horn of Africa

This technical brief was commissioned by the Technical Consortium for Building Resilience in the Horn of Africa as one of a series of briefs. The Technical Consortium was established to support the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and national governments in the Greater Horn of Africa. ILRI is the host organization of the technical consortium, which seeks to develop regional, national and investment programs for the long-term development of the arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs) in the Horn of Africa. The objective is to support IGAD and common program frameworks to end drought related emergencies and build resilience in the Horn of Africa

Greedy Algorithm for Inference of Decision Trees from Decision Rule Systems

Decision trees and decision rule systems play important roles as classifiers, knowledge representation tools, and algorithms. They are easily interpretable models for data analysis, making them widely used and studied in computer science. Understanding the relationships between these two models is an important task in this field. There are well-known methods for converting decision trees into systems of decision rules. In this paper, we consider the inverse transformation problem, which is not so simple. Instead of constructing an entire decision tree, our study focuses on a greedy polynomial time algorithm that simulates the operation of a decision tree on a given tuple of attribute values.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2305.01721, arXiv:2302.0706

Bounds on Depth of Decision Trees Derived from Decision Rule Systems

Systems of decision rules and decision trees are widely used as a means for knowledge representation, as classifiers, and as algorithms. They are among the most interpretable models for classifying and representing knowledge. The study of relationships between these two models is an important task of computer science. It is easy to transform a decision tree into a decision rule system. The inverse transformation is a more difficult task. In this paper, we study unimprovable upper and lower bounds on the minimum depth of decision trees derived from decision rule systems depending on the various parameters of these systems

Adding a Student Research Component to an Information Technology Ethics Course

This brief report describes research into the integration of a student research project into an information technology professionalism and ethics course (ITEC 3900). Various investigators have introduced student research projects into other specific IT courses. These investigators have attributed educational benefits to the inclusion of research into these courses. The present research incorporates a student research project into the ITEC 3900 course content that not only enhances the students understanding of the underlying professional practice and ethics principles but also exposes the students to Structural Equations Modeling (SEM) as a research tool. The research project is designed to allow students (1) to ask questions beyond the materials presented in class, (2) to synthesize their own model of how the underlying principles in those materials are interrelated and (3) to experimentally test their model through survey-based data collection and SEM statistical data analysis

A Local Approach to Studying the Time and Space Complexity of Deterministic and Nondeterministic Decision Trees

In this paper, we study arbitrary infinite binary information systems each of which consists of an infinite set called universe and an infinite set of two-valued functions (attributes) defined on the universe. We consider the notion of a problem over information system, which is described by a finite number of attributes and a mapping associating a decision to each tuple of attribute values. As algorithms for problem solving, we investigate deterministic and nondeterministic decision trees that use only attributes from the problem description. Nondeterministic decision trees are representations of decision rule systems that sometimes have less space complexity than the original rule systems. As time and space complexity, we study the depth and the number of nodes in the decision trees. In the worst case, with the growth of the number of attributes in the problem description, (i) the minimum depth of deterministic decision trees grows either as a logarithm or linearly, (ii) the minimum depth of nondeterministic decision trees either is bounded from above by a constant or grows linearly, (iii) the minimum number of nodes in deterministic decision trees has either polynomial or exponential growth, and (iv) the minimum number of nodes in nondeterministic decision trees has either polynomial or exponential growth. Based on these results, we divide the set of all infinite binary information systems into three complexity classes. This allows us to identify nontrivial relationships between deterministic decision trees and decision rules systems represented by nondeterministic decision trees. For each class, we study issues related to time-space trade-off for deterministic and nondeterministic decision trees.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2201.0101